Tile, and equivalent blocky panels used for providing the wear surfaces of floors and walls often are bedded in a cementitious and/or resinous layer of settable or otherwise hardenable material, with some spacing being provided between edges of adjoining panels, which provide exposed joints, in which the bedding material, or a screeded or flowed into place outward extension thereof, is exposed. The exposed outer surface of the joint material may be flush with the wear surfaces of the panels, or (more commonly) outwardly shallowly concave, or otherwise patterned.
The floors or walls may be located within a building, or wholly or partly outdoors.
Most commonly, such wear surfaces require cleaning at least once at the conclusion of the installation process. Depending on the location, cleaning may, from time to time, be thereafter necessary or desirable.
Especially when such surfaces are provided on floors, a common way to clean them is to spread a layer of cleaning solution on the floor, e.g., by pouring or spraying, to swab, scrub or burnish the surfaces using mops, scrubbing machines and/or buffers. While the techniques conventionally used may be quite adequate for efficiently cleaning the exposed surfaces of the tiles, brick or other panels per se, it has heretofore been difficult or impossible to efficiently clean the exposed surface of the joint material. It is not uncommon for the mechanized cleaning of the panel surfaces, to be accompanied by manual, on-hands-and-knees cleaning of the joint surface, using scrub-brushes, and even tooth brushes. Special tile grout cleaning tools have previously been devised by others, but they are designed for cleaning one band of joint surface at a time, and generally are meant to be used while the worker is down on hands and knees.